1. Field
The present disclosure relates to computer-generated animation and, more specifically, to tagging computer-generated animation assets using arbitrary hierarchical tags.
2. Related Art
A computer-generated animation is typically created by rendering a sequence of images, with each image depicting a computer-generated scene composed of one or more computer-generated animation assets (hereafter “animation assets”). An animation asset refers to an object in a computer animation, such as a character, a car, a tree, a building, and the like. Light sources, materials, textures, and other visual effects may be associated with the animation assets to create realistic lighting effects for the computer-generated scene. Properly implementing these visual effects can involve configuring large amounts of data used by numerous external animation processes, such as rendering, shading, rasterizing, lighting, and the like. Lighting processes may include shadowing calculations, reflection calculations, transmission calculations, and the like. Managing the configuration data and external animation processes can be difficult due to the large amount of data and large number of processes required to produce computer-generated animations and the complex dependencies that exist among them.
For example, film production lighting typically requires an artist to configure tens to thousands of inputs or parameters for each shot in a computer-generated animation. For example, an artist called a lighter may be required to select one or more light sources (e.g., ambient light source, point light source, spotlight, or the like) used to illuminate the computer-generated scene as well as configure surface shaders to simulate the optical properties (e.g., color, texture, specular properties, subsurface light scattering effects, and the like) of each surface of each animation asset in that scene. Thus, the appearance of an animation asset in the scene depends on, among other things, the one or more light sources and the outputs of the external shading processes used to simulate the optical properties of the various surfaces of that animation asset.
As more parameters and animation assets are added to the scene, the process of configuring the scene becomes exceedingly complex. To make the process more manageable, an artist may choose to work on only a subset of animation assets at a time.
It is therefore desirable to create a system to efficiently identify, organize, and select groups of animation assets for further animation work.